afr article, page-8

I read that article in the AFR this morning and basically dismissed it - though it was nice to see EXT mentioned in a positive light. There's a lot more meat in the PayDirt article - which is great for EXT.

tech weenie post only from here on, nothing really to do with EXT, so move on if you don't want tech crap about image formats on the web...

DX2, I think it is a strange choice. Not for people who know what a TIFF is, but a lot of people don't, so from that perspective, it's a strange choice. I do graphics for a living, and am always constrained on the web by what is accessible for the broadest number of people.

TIFF is a great format for exchanging graphics, which is what it was designed for, but a PDF is a much more accessible format which is almost universally readable - Adobe reader has a huge penetration, and most announcement on the ASX are already PDF's, so you can expect people to have the reader installed.

PDF's, in comparison to TIFF's, use JPG compression which is inherently lossy, and inferior to a lossless format, but fine for the web. JPG compression only loses quality once, in the original compression - it doesn't matter how many times it's opened (though re-compressing it by re-saving it with JPG compression will lose quality) - and you can control the compression level. A TIFF will generally be larger than a JPG, but not necessarily, as TIFF's can use LZW compression, and depending on the compression in the JPG, any the complexity of the image, it may actually end up smaller than the JPG.

The ideal image format for a newspaper clipping, that is, the widest accessible straight image format, with no loss in quality, is a PNG. If the levels are adjusted correctly in Photoshop, this will very nicely compress losslessly, as you can take it to 16 shades of grey - white to black, so only requires 4 bits per pixel and can be further compressed. That said, PDF is much more of a standard.

I wouldn't have bother with this tech stuff, but for the slight change that anyone from EXT reads this. I just wanted to mention that posting releases as PDF would be more accessible for the majority of people.

Tech weenie hat off. I need another beer.